A number of systems and programs are offered on the market for the design of parts or assemblies of parts, such as the one provided by DASSAULT SYSTEMES under the trademark CATIA. These so-called computer-aided design (CAD) systems allow a user to construct and manipulate complex three dimensional (3D) models of objects or assemblies of objects. CAD systems thus provide a representation of modeled objects using edges or lines, in certain cases with faces. Lines or edges may be represented in various manners, e.g. non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS). These CAD systems manage parts or assemblies of parts as modeled objects, which are essentially specifications of geometry. Specifically, CAD files contain specifications, from which geometry is generated, from geometry a representation is generated. Specifications, geometry and representation may be stored in a single CAD file or multiple ones. CAD systems include graphic tools for representing the modeled objects to the designers; these tools are dedicated to the display of complex objects—the typical size of a file representing an object in a CAD system being in the range of a Mega-byte for a part, and an assembly may comprise thousands of parts. A CAD system manages models of objects, which are stored in electronic files.
There also exists product life cycle management solutions (PLM), such as the one provided by DASSAULT SYSTEMES under the trademarks CATIA, ENOVIA and DELMIA; these solutions provide a Engineering Hub, which organizes product engineering knowledge, a Manufacturing Hub, which manages manufacturing engineering knowledge, and an Enterprise Hub which enables enterprise integrations and connections into both the Engineering and Manufacturing Hubs. All together the systems deliver an open object model linking products, processes, resources to enable dynamic, knowledge-based product creation and decision support that drives optimized product definition, manufacturing preparation, production and service. Such PLM solutions comprise a relational database of products. The database comprises a set of textual data and relations between the data. Data typically include technical data related to the products said data being ordered in a hierarchy of data and are indexed to be searchable. The data are representative of the products, which are often modeled objects.
One of the problems in such PLM solutions is that the users of the system may wish to display results of querying, for instance concerning objects (e.g. products or product parts) stored on a database, and possibly have a 3D graphic representation of said results. Then, the user typically needs to navigate amongst the displayed results.
In a neighboring technical field, several celebrated search engines have been developed for retrieving information on the Internet. For instance, the ALTA VISTA Company proposed an Internet search site, with a request box where the user may input keywords for retrieving information. More recently, GOOGLE Inc. proposed a searching tool for searching html files or text documents (in the PDF, MICROSOFT Word or RTF formats) available through the Internet. The results are returned to the user as a list of sorted web pages, see e.g. U.S. Pat. No. 6,285,999, with a given number of result pages that a user can subsequently explore. Each result is displayed as a URL, together with an abstract of the document accessible through the URL. The abstract is an extract of sentences or part of sentences of the document. If a web page is comprised of frames, the result returned to the user may be the URL of the frame, together with an abstract of the frame. Each frame is therefore searched and handled individually by the engine.
More generally, a web search engine, such as GOOGLE and MSN search provides a way to access information content from a global index. In particular, they do provide access to information entries that are accessible from a remote computer, for example through the HTTP, FTP or NNTP protocols.
Other searching tools exist for searching and retrieving information on the Internet. In particular, aside from search engines are also known web directories, which are directories on the WWW that specialize in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. Web directories often allow site owners to submit their site for inclusion. For example, YAHOO! is a computer services company which operates an Internet portal, a web directory and a host of other services including the e-mail services. Web directories often make use of search engine technologies. As regards more particularly the web directory, there is again provided a request box. Results of a search input to the request box are displayed in several sections. The first section displays the category matches, together with the path to the matches in the category tree, while the second section displays site matches. The third section displays web pages. GOOGLE Inc. also provides an Internet site for search among sites and categories. The results of a search contain an indication of the classification of sites and categories. Selecting the category search provides the user with a list of categories that may relate to the search; the contents of each category may later be accessed.
Still other solutions rely on multi-criteria-based queries in databases for retrieving information.
In the above cases, the results returned from a query are sorted and accessible in several sections or pages. Exploration of the results is therefore limited to a page-by-page or section-by-section process. Within a given page or section, a summary of the results may be available. However, the user has no clue about results contained within other sections or pages. The user can therefore not see how a particular result correlates to remaining results. Exploration of the results may therefore appears too strict for the user.
Thus, according to the limitations of the existing solutions shortly discussed above, there is a need for an improved solution of navigation among results returned from a query. Preferably, said solution should allow a user to easily navigate in a database of a product lifecycle management system, storing notably complex modeled objects.